In an April post, I made my case for narration in eLearning. As a learner, I love it (when done right). So as a developer, I like to create narrated courses. Many of us, for budgetary reasons, have to do our own in-house narration work. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing - I made the point in that earlier post that professional voiceover work can sound synthetic if you don’t get the right voice for your project. And I won’t even start griping about those robotic text-to-speech tools that are being foisted upon the eLearning development community (note my rant on ...

After what seemed like an endless wait, my favorite eLearning development apps have finally been refreshed. Articulate Studio ‘09 was released last night, including all-new versions of Presenter, Quizmaker, and Engage, as well as a new app, Articulate Video Encoder. In addition to fixing the niggling flaws with the previous versions that bugged me ... amazing new features (branching, yay!) that, in concert, simply leave other eLearning development apps I’ve seen in ... versions are more beautiful and easier to use than ever. And the price (for eLearning development software) can’t ...

Anyone who has ever taken an eLearning course or watched a PowerPoint presentation (i.e. all of us) knows that the effective use of color is not a common human ability. Based on countless cans of unused interior house paint I have chosen with much deliberation, only to become horrified once I actually put the paint on the wall, I can attest to this ... your own color theme for your eLearning course with the online tools, or choose from thousands of themes created (and ... for Kuler. Now there’s no excuse for offensive color combinations in your eLearning courses. Helpful hint: ...

... still harbor hope that TechSmith will see the light and develop SnagIt for Mac (and suspect they are secretly busy doing ... beautiful (both visually and functionally) website development app RapidWeaver in their portfolio, I have high hopes ...

... elearning, development, implementation, training, demos, etc. I will have some SME's eventually, but it's going to take a ... time that I would much rather be spending on our corporate elearning development. It's very difficult to express this ... I know after going to the eLearning Guild Annual Gathering last year and chatting with folks I met that there are so many of us that are little departments of only one or if you are lucky two people with in them. I find that I am ... to in order for the pilot piece to take place.I work within the Organization Development department of our hospital ...

... elearning, development, implementation, training, demos, etc. I will have some SME's eventually, but it's going to take a ... time that I would much rather be spending on our corporate elearning development. It's very difficult to express this ... I know after going to the eLearning Guild Annual Gathering last year and chatting with folks I met that there are so many of us that are little departments of only one or if you are lucky two people with in them. I find that I am ... to in order for the pilot piece to take place.I work within the Organization Development department of our hospital ...

Personally, for eLearning development, I find more value in studying good presentation design than I do in studying good eLearning design. Why? Because there seem to be more folks out there sharing their knowledge about good presentation design than there are sharing good eLearning design. Which is slightly baffling to me, as we’ve all been exposed ... also going on my blogroll), should be on the must-buy list of every eLearning developer. Too many eLearning developers ... I strongly believe that good presentation design and understanding good eLearning design are two sides of the ...

Recently I’ve been pushing our organization to focus on nurturing more in-house eLearning development skill versus frequently relying on outside vendors who give us mundane eLearning at outrageous prices. “We can do far ... dials? Seriously? And if eLearning development is such a menial, low-grade task, why are we paying vendors high-grade dollars to do eLearning development for us? Someone please explain the logic here. With this kind of attitude, it’s ... bunch of SMEs to hash out the course content is of more monetary worth than the eLearning developer who has to step ...

I often get requests for visual timelines in eLearning courses. Typically I’ll try to cobble something together using PowerPoint’s charting or drawing tools (shudder). Sometimes I’ll create the timeline in Apple’s Keynote (much nicer charting tools) and bring the graphic into PowerPoint (since I do most of my development work in Articulate Presenter). I’ve also created timelines from scratch using something like Adobe Fireworks, which can be a time-consuming endeavor. Timeline from Bee Documents looks like an interesting application. Whip up a ...

Jay Cross cracks me up (in a good way). When he’s not sharing gorgeous travel photos (including pictures of some of the most unique food you’ll ever see), he comes up with gems related to informal learning and educational technology. One of his latest offerings is a chart that outlines a variety of Web 2.0 tools, including a brief description of their business value. This is great! I appreciate that Jay is able to succinctly articulate their business value, especially because many people still don’t take these tools seriously. Click below to view the table: Found via: http:/ ...

... lingual content? I’d love to hear from eLearning developers/integrators, as well as any vendors that may be listening. I doubt I’m the first person to tackle multi-lingual eLearning. And just maybe this info will be helpful to ... to me; I have only worked with LMSs and eLearning courses in English. So I embarked on many hours of research (thank you, eLearning Guild) and web surfing to learn about multi-lingual LMSs. I read data sheets and sales-speak until my eyes ... supported the required languages, and second, they all rated well in The eLearning Guild’s 2008 360-Degree Report ...

Within a few hours of each other, I received two requests for referral to service providers. One request was for eLearning development providers from fairly large 5,000+ employees based in the US.We've looked at a few eLearning vendors and haven't been thrilled. We found the three US vendors expensive and/or light on good ID and the India-based vendors (Tata and Brainvisa) are priced really well, but would require more extensive project, quality and ID management. So ... sure about it. They are fairly new to eLearning design and development.The other request is for providers of ...

Within a few hours of each other, I received two requests for referral to service providers. One request was for eLearning development providers from fairly large 5,000+ employees based in the US.We've looked at a few eLearning vendors and havenâ¬"t been thrilled. We found the three US vendors expensive and/or light on good ID and the India-based vendors (Tata and Brainvisa) are priced really well, but would require more extensive project, quality and ID management. So ... sure about it. They are fairly new to eLearning design and development.The other request is for providers of ...

... there are other reasons, but I’ll stop here… The topic of RSS came up for me recently because eLearning Weekly was just listed on a new web site called Alltop.com (actually, the eLearning Weekly link is on Alltop’s Education page). Alltop is a project developed by Will Mayall, Kathryn Henkens, and Guy Kawasaki. At first glance, the site ...

... being an eLearning developer / designer. This is what life is really like. This is what you face. This is how they handle ... elearning about health and safety in the workplace" and we will go away for a few days, only to return with an all-singing, all-dancing piece of elearning that covers exactly what they wanted to cover and includes all sorts of sexy ... management development programme they have asked me to develop, but getting access to SMEs and stakeholders is like pulling ... actions.Wouldn't you say?I've discussed similar kinds of issues in What Clients Really Want : eLearning ...

... being an eLearning developer / designer. This is what life is really like. This is what you face. This is how they handle ... elearning about health and safety in the workplace" and we will go away for a few days, only to return with an all-singing, all-dancing piece of elearning that covers exactly what they wanted to cover and includes all sorts of sexy ... management development programme they have asked me to develop, but getting access to SMEs and stakeholders is like pulling ... actions.Wouldn't you say?I've discussed similar kinds of issues in What Clients Really Want : eLearning ...